HCTC Skitters into converged video era

Hill Country Telephone Cooperative of Ingram, Tex., has finished the second phase of its deployment of the Skitter.TV broadband video platform, a step that demonstrates how some small telcos are turning away from traditional IPTV architectures to deploy less-expensive, broadband-based hybrid video alternatives.

HCTC, which serves about 14,000 telephone customers and 5200 Internet customers in 14 Texas counties, is nearing the home stretch of a four-year, $57 million fiber-to-the-node buildout that includes Cisco Systems routers, Occam Networks DSLAMs and Zeugma Systems services nodes, along with Skitter Acclaim video encoders. The Skitter encoders will allow the telco to blend many types of content — broadcast, satellite, local affiliate, online video, for example — into a single delivery approach for its customers. HCTC’s plan for later this year is to present a linear lineup of 70 cable and satellite TV network channels and 42 broadcast TV channels from local affiliates in nearby Austin and San Antonio, said Kerry Sutton, manager of competitive businesses for HCTC.

And in a contradiction to the typical perception that small telcos don’t face much competition, Sutton said HCTC is seeing an abundance of pressure from the likes of Suddenlink Communications, Time Warner Cable and Dish Network. “But we don’t want to be just like everybody else and offer services that are a dime a dozen,” he said. “We want to offer things like social media applications, remote security monitoring services for your security gate at home or maybe out where you’ve got a deer blind set up, videoconferencing or maybe a Skype video offering. These are all possible future applications for us.”

Sutton said HCTC looked at several different video options but that the advantage of the Skitter.TV platform from Atlanta-based vendor Skitter is that it “allows us to take a lot of different content and inject it all together.”

Skitter launched late last year, joining a cadre of FTTN-based video platforms specifically targeting Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers for which IPTV would be an expensive, geographically-limited video option. “A lot of activity is driven by market dynamics,” said Laura Tanner, vice president of marketing for Skitter. “Traditional IPTV architectures might allow a telco in a smaller market to reach only 10% to 20% of their customers, whereas we can help them get to 70% or 80%.”